Former British Land delivery head takes up senior role on JP Morgan tower planned for Canary Wharf

British Land’s former head of development delivery Alan Bunting has become the next major name to land a key role on JP Morgan Chase’s plan to build a new headquarters building in Canary Wharf.

Bunting left British Land in the spring but Building understands he has now joined the banking giant in a managing director role working on its new HQ. JP Morgan Chase declined to comment.

Bunting joined British Land a decade ago as a project director from Ramboll and was promoted to head of development delivery nearly seven years ago before leaving at the end of March.

In the summer, Alinea co-founder Steve Watts, who was also a long-standing chair of the Council on Tall Buildings, joined JP Morgan as its cost and commercial managing director for the building at Riverside South.

JP Morgan has been putting together a team to build the tower designed by Foster & Partners with Watts being the first high-profile recruit.

No details of how tall the tower will be or what it will look like have been released but it is understood Fosters had originally come up with three options and what is known is that it will run across three million sq ft and be home to 12,000 employees while flight path regulations in the area mean it cannot be more than 265m high.

Earlier this year, Building revealed that Gardiner & Theobald had been appointed to a cost consultancy role on the scheme. The firm has been helping out with early feasibility work although that is understood to have now finished.

The cost of the JP Morgan scheme has been put at £10bn and will be built on the Riverside South plot that was due to be developed by the bank nearly 20 years ago before being put on hold because of the financial crash.

JP Morgan then moved into a building on the estate previously occupied by failed Wall Street bank Lehman Brothers, paying £495m for the site in 2010. It also leases space at 1 Cabot Square.

But, according to insiders, the bank, which also has a site at Victoria Embankment near Blackfriars, is “bursting at the seams” at its 25 Bank Street site and settled on Riverside South after looking at locations in both the City and Canary Wharf.

London tower builders have put the plans on their radar with JP Morgan understood to be mulling whether to use contractors like Mace and Multiplex for the job – or stick to Canary Wharf Contractors which has carried out much of the building work at the Docklands estate over the years.